Promised to His Shadow

Chapter Five

A Question No One Wants To be Answered

Elianne’s POV

The royal physician’s name was Master Theo Aldric — no relation to the steward, despite the shared name, a coincidence that had made for one awkward dinner conversation in Elianne’s first week at Valmonde and very little since. He was a small, precise man with ink-stained fingers and the permanently apologetic posture of someone who had spent thirty years delivering bad news to people who outranked him by a considerable margin. Elianne had noticed him twice now at the edges of court gatherings, always near the door, always the first to leave.

She found him on a Tuesday in the herbarium behind the east wing, ostensibly tending the kitchen garden’s medicinal beds, in fact doing what she suspected he did most days now — finding somewhere quiet enough that no one would ask him a question he didn’t want to answer.

"Master Aldric." She kept her voice light, unthreatening, the voice she used for nervous tradesmen and overcautious tutors. "I wonder if I might ask you something about Prince Adrien."

His hands stilled over a row of lavender. He did not turn around immediately, and when he did, his face had arranged itself into the careful blankness she was beginning to recognize as the house style at Valmonde — the look of a man deciding, in real time, exactly how much truth a question was worth.

"My lady. I examined His Highness very thoroughly. Whatever questions you have, I assure you the report given to the king was complete."

"I haven’t seen the report."

"No," he said slowly. "I don’t suppose you would have."

It was, in its way, an answer all by itself — the particular emphasis on would have, as though there were a version of events in which she might reasonably have seen it, and they both understood she had been deliberately kept from that version.

* * *

She did not push him that first day. She had learned enough about the court in just over a week, to understand that frightened men did not yield information to pressure — they yielded it, if at all, to patience and the slow accumulation of trust, and she had nothing but time and an excellent memory for who owed her kindness.

She brought him a jar of her mother’s honey the following week, the kind Castelane was known for, golden and faintly bitter from the heather the bees fed on. She asked him, with what she hoped sounded like genuine curiosity rather than interrogation, about the medicinal properties of the herbs he grew. She let three more visits pass before she asked her real question, and even then she asked it sideways, the way her father had taught her to approach a hostile negotiation — never head-on, never first.

"You said you examined him thoroughly." She kept her eyes on the lavender, not on him, giving him somewhere to look that wasn’t her face. "What does thoroughly mean, exactly, for a death that everyone insists was a fall?"

For a long moment he said nothing at all. She watched his hands, which had gone very still again, and she understood that whatever he said next would cost him something, and that he was weighing the cost against whatever loyalty or fear had kept him silent until now.

"There were marks," he said finally, so quietly she had to lean in to catch it. "On his arm. Small. The kind a horse’s fall wouldn’t explain, not in that location, not at that angle."

Her heart was suddenly very loud in her own ears. "What kind of marks?"

"The kind I’ve seen exactly once before, my lady, on a stable hand who died after handling a shipment of feed that had gone wrong. A puncture. Something administered, not something fallen onto." He looked up at her then, and the fear in his face was no longer carefully arranged at all. "I wrote none of this in my report. I was told, very plainly, that the cause of death was already determined, and that my role was to confirm it, not to complicate it."

"Told by whom?"

He shook his head, and the fear closed back over his face like a shutter. "I’ve already said more than I should have. Please, my lady. I have a family."

* * *

She walked back through the gardens afterward in a kind of daze, the late afternoon light doing nothing to warm the cold that had settled into her chest. A puncture. Something administered. She turned the words over and over, trying to fit them into some shape that didn’t mean what she already knew it meant.

She found Gabriel in the small council chamber off the library, bent over a ledger with the particular focus of a man trying very hard not to think about something else. He looked up when she entered, and whatever he saw in her face made him set down his pen immediately.

"What happened?"

She told him. All of it — the marks, the puncture, the physician’s fear, the report that had been written before the body was even fully examined. She watched his face while she spoke, watched the careful composure he wore like armor c***k slightly at the edges, watched something harden behind his eyes that hadn’t been there a moment before.

"Someone poisoned him," he said, when she’d finished. It wasn’t a question.

"I think so. I think Aldric thinks so too, and I think he’s been too frightened to say it to anyone with the power to act on it."

Gabriel was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke again, his voice had dropped into something low and dangerous that she hadn’t heard from him before, not even at the funeral. "If someone in this house poisoned my brother, Elianne, I will find them if it takes the rest of my life. I want you to understand that. Whatever this costs, whoever it turns out to be."

"Even if it turns out to be someone close to you?"

His jaw tightened, and for a moment she thought he wouldn’t answer at all. "Especially then," he said finally. "A man who would do this to Adrien and call himself family afterward doesn’t deserve the protection of the word."

She believed him. That frightened her almost as much as the physician’s marks had, because believing him meant trusting him, and trusting him had stopped, somewhere in the last two weeks, being the simple, careful thing it was supposed to be.

* * *

"We can’t go to your father with this," she said, once the first wave of his anger had settled into something colder and more useful. "Not yet. If the king moves against the wrong person, or moves too publicly, whoever did this will simply disappear, or arrange for someone else to take the blame. We need more than one frightened physician’s account of a puncture wound."

Gabriel studied her for a long moment, and something in his expression shifted — surprise, she thought, though whether at the strategy itself or at the fact that she’d arrived at it before he had, she couldn’t quite tell. "You’ve thought about this already."

"I’ve thought about very little else since the clearing." She sat across from him, the ledger forgotten between them. "My father taught me that the moment you reveal what you know, you lose the advantage of knowing it. Whoever did this believes they succeeded cleanly. That belief is the only weapon we have right now, and I’d rather not spend it before we understand the whole shape of what we’re fighting."

"And if Aldric is in danger? If whoever silenced his report decides a frightened physician is a loose thread worth cutting?"

The thought had occurred to her on the walk over, and she hadn’t liked it any better the second time. "Then we protect him quietly. A reason to send him somewhere safer, perhaps — an outbreak at one of the border estates that needs his particular expertise. Something that looks like ordinary court business and isn’t."

Gabriel’s mouth curved, just slightly, the first almost-smile she’d seen from him since the funeral, though there was no real humor in it. "Remind me never to negotiate against you for anything that matters."

"You’re already married to me. I assumed that ship had sailed."

The almost-smile became something closer to real, gone again almost as quickly as it arrived, but she had seen it, and some small, traitorous part of her chest had warmed at having put it there.

* * *

They spent the better part of an hour after that mapping out, in low voices, exactly who had been present in the clearing the morning Adrien died. Gabriel knew the hunting party by name — two of his own guard, a huntmaster who’d served the family for two decades, three lords who’d been invited more for politics than for any real love of the chase. Elianne added what she remembered of the aftermath: who had arrived first, who had lingered, who had left before anyone thought to ask them a single question.

Renaud’s name came up twice, and both times Gabriel’s expression flickered toward something he didn’t let himself finish saying out loud.

"You hesitate every time I mention your uncle," she said finally, watching him carefully.

"He wasn’t in the clearing. He arrived afterward, same as I did." Gabriel’s voice was even, deliberately so. "I have no reason to suspect him beyond the fact that he arrived afterward and somehow already knew exactly what needed to be said to whom. It unsettles me. It isn’t evidence."

"No," she agreed slowly. "But it’s worth remembering."

They did not finish the conversation that night. The candles had burned low, and a steward had knocked twice already to ask if anything further was required, and there was only so much grief and suspicion a person could hold in their chest before the body simply insisted on rest. But something had shifted in the room over the course of that hour — a partnership where there had only been a transaction before, two people who had been handed to each other by treaty and were, slowly and without either of them quite admitting it, choosing to become something else as well.

Elianne walked back to her chambers that night thinking less about Aldric’s trembling hands or the puncture wound on Adrien’s arm than about the way Gabriel had looked at her across the council table — not with the careful, guilty distance he’d kept since the garden, but with something that looked, for just a moment, like a man who had stopped fighting quite so hard against wanting what was already, however unwillingly, his.

She told herself this was simply relief at having an ally. She did not entirely believe herself, and for the first time since the funeral, she found she didn’t have the energy left to argue the point.

****

End of Chapter Five